Jeff blogs about the exact reason that I don’t use an active running virus scanner on my PC at home.  They use WAY TOO MANY system resources, and they are only as good as the list of known viruses.  Plus at home nobody runs as administrator.  That said, I still run a full system scan every couple weeks.  Just because I’m still slightly paranoid.

I have a hard time telling my parents or in-laws to turn their virus scanning software off though.  Everyone seems to have at least one or two programs that will not run unless you are an administrator.  Sometimes you can get around that by just giving the non-admin user access to whichever Program Files\{application} folder the needed program resides in.  But doing that makes me feel dirty and just seems like a problem waiting to happen.  

Sometimes it’s hard to hear about how the PC is running so slow, when turning off that one program could potentially double their disk access time.